“Actually spreads more like the AIDS virus - it’s not airborne:”
Probably no longer true as this recent incident shows:
The spread of this outbreak from Guinea to Liberia in March shows how tracing even the most routine aspects of peoples’ lives, relationships and reactions will be vital to containing Ebola’s spread.
The original case in that instance is believed by epidemiologists and virus experts to have been a woman who went to a market in Guinea before returning, unwell, to her home village in neighbouring northern Liberia.
The woman’s sister cared for her, and in doing so contracted the Ebola virus herself before her sibling died of the haemorrhagic fever it causes.
Feeling unwell and fearing a similar fate, the sister wanted to see her husband - an internal migrant worker then employed on the other side of Liberia at the Firestone rubber plantation.
She took a communal taxi via Liberia’s capital Monrovia, exposing five other people to the virus who later contracted and died of the Ebola
Probably pretty packed in but no more so than a metro in any large city at rush hour.